More MOCO Upzoning - Starting in Silver Spring

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

I’m PP. You’re being deliberately obtuse, but since you can’t let things go (or understand nuance), I support the plans to switch the sidewalks and the planting strips for safety, and even widen them, though not to the extent that they eat up traffic lanes which is also proposed. I support making it easier for people to turn into retail establishments. I support improvements to existing bus stops to make them better for the people waiting. I support improvements to pedestrian crossings at busy intersections. I support duplexes and townhomes in certain areas, as well as infill of religious institutions subject to the details. I don’t support dedicated bus lanes, eliminating multiple traffic lanes, money spent on bike facilities in the middle of the suburbs, or mid-rise mixed use without a lot of thought going into traffic impacts.

Now I’m sure you’ll come back with “what does X even mean???” since you keep saying that. But you are purposefully choosing to not understand that people can support modest improvements without wanting everything overhauled, and I’m not going to keep going back and forth with you.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

You again mischaracterize the PP's post for your no-change strawman, when PP did not indicate "no change," but the following:

"traffic improvements to deal with congestion" -- change; transportation-related

"solutions for parking where needed" -- change; zoning, development and transportation-related

"good public schools" -- possible change, depending on how one might view schools; zoning/development-related from the land use, overcrowding and impact tax perspectives; tangentially transportation-related from the perspective of distances traveled where school facilities might not be near enough, with additional/longer bus trips

"good public safety" -- possible change, again depending on how one might view current safety; tangential relation to transportation with respect to enforcement/signage; very tangential with respect to zoning/development, as there can be behavioral differences encouraged by the look of an area (setbacks, open passageways, etc.; one fully expects that you might jump all over this, despite its being well supported and noted as tangential, instead of concentrating on the more directly relevant items, here)

"targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space)" -- change; clearly related to zoning & development

"pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" -- change; clearly related to zoning/development/transportation (yet you pick this one from among all of them to criticize a lack of specificity)

"local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth" -- possible change; clearly related to zoning/development; tangential relationship to transportation from the perspectives of growth-related traffic and associated cost

"local politicians that aren’t captured by developers" -- change, depending on one's view of the current relationship between local politicians and developers; related to zoning/development and associated transportation

"recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city" -- here's one that has a clearer no-change-in-this-location bent, but is related to all of the requested topics, and, given all of the above, easily can be taken as a shaping thought about any of the changes that might come

And all this was in response to the broad question, "What are you FOR?," before the demand for specific zoning/development/transportation relationships that, upon reflection, were covered.

Seriously, y'all, your engagement in this topic is bankrupt, simply rife with rhetoric employing logical fallacy. One might expect more coming...

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

Doing nothing is, in fact, the default option. It’s up to the council and the planning board to propose SPECIFIC changes AND provide some evidence that it’s worth the time and money spent, to include benefits to current residents of the area. Instead, the county treats this as a project that has already been decided and they are being SO gracious in allowing the residents to have some tangential input.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

Doing nothing is, in fact, the default option. It’s up to the council and the planning board to propose SPECIFIC changes AND provide some evidence that it’s worth the time and money spent, to include benefits to current residents of the area. Instead, the county treats this as a project that has already been decided and they are being SO gracious in allowing the residents to have some tangential input.

That's because they view people as an obstacle to overcome.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

I’m PP. You’re being deliberately obtuse, but since you can’t let things go (or understand nuance), I support the plans to switch the sidewalks and the planting strips for safety, and even widen them, though not to the extent that they eat up traffic lanes which is also proposed. I support making it easier for people to turn into retail establishments. I support improvements to existing bus stops to make them better for the people waiting. I support improvements to pedestrian crossings at busy intersections. I support duplexes and townhomes in certain areas, as well as infill of religious institutions subject to the details. I don’t support dedicated bus lanes, eliminating multiple traffic lanes, money spent on bike facilities in the middle of the suburbs, or mid-rise mixed use without a lot of thought going into traffic impacts.

Now I’m sure you’ll come back with “what does X even mean???” since you keep saying that. But you are purposefully choosing to not understand that people can support modest improvements without wanting everything overhauled, and I’m not going to keep going back and forth with you.

Not the guy youte replying to but I think we don't need a survey we can just tell you don't care about anything but preserving the driving status quo even if it makes things worse.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

I’m PP. You’re being deliberately obtuse, but since you can’t let things go (or understand nuance), I support the plans to switch the sidewalks and the planting strips for safety, and even widen them, though not to the extent that they eat up traffic lanes which is also proposed. I support making it easier for people to turn into retail establishments. I support improvements to existing bus stops to make them better for the people waiting. I support improvements to pedestrian crossings at busy intersections. I support duplexes and townhomes in certain areas, as well as infill of religious institutions subject to the details. I don’t support dedicated bus lanes, eliminating multiple traffic lanes, money spent on bike facilities in the middle of the suburbs, or mid-rise mixed use without a lot of thought going into traffic impacts.

Now I’m sure you’ll come back with “what does X even mean???” since you keep saying that. But you are purposefully choosing to not understand that people can support modest improvements without wanting everything overhauled, and I’m not going to keep going back and forth with you.

Not the guy youte replying to but I think we don't need a survey we can just tell you don't care about anything but preserving the driving status quo even if it makes things worse.

This is a response to all that they wrote?

How on Earth do YIMBYs get their policies implemented…it seems like it would be easy pushing these awful arguments over.

In other news, it looks like the Forest Glen Civic Association played a part in stopping the construction of a large multifamily project near the metro station. Not sure what exactly was objectionable, but it is what it is. The 4corners associations need to get involved, and fast.

On the other hand, the large residential project in downtown Silver Spring on top of the mall is moving forward. I wonder what the difference was…? Could it be a properly zoned large scale project in a downtown area versus a medium high rise in a SFH residential zone?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

I’m PP. You’re being deliberately obtuse, but since you can’t let things go (or understand nuance), I support the plans to switch the sidewalks and the planting strips for safety, and even widen them, though not to the extent that they eat up traffic lanes which is also proposed. I support making it easier for people to turn into retail establishments. I support improvements to existing bus stops to make them better for the people waiting. I support improvements to pedestrian crossings at busy intersections. I support duplexes and townhomes in certain areas, as well as infill of religious institutions subject to the details. I don’t support dedicated bus lanes, eliminating multiple traffic lanes, money spent on bike facilities in the middle of the suburbs, or mid-rise mixed use without a lot of thought going into traffic impacts.

Now I’m sure you’ll come back with “what does X even mean???” since you keep saying that. But you are purposefully choosing to not understand that people can support modest improvements without wanting everything overhauled, and I’m not going to keep going back and forth with you.

Not the guy youte replying to but I think we don't need a survey we can just tell you don't care about anything but preserving the driving status quo even if it makes things worse.

This is a response to all that they wrote?

How on Earth do YIMBYs get their policies implemented…it seems like it would be easy pushing these awful arguments over.

In other news, it looks like the Forest Glen Civic Association played a part in stopping the construction of a large multifamily project near the metro station. Not sure what exactly was objectionable, but it is what it is. The 4corners associations need to get involved, and fast.

On the other hand, the large residential project in downtown Silver Spring on top of the mall is moving forward. I wonder what the difference was…? Could it be a properly zoned large scale project in a downtown area versus a medium high rise in a SFH residential zone?

While not exactly an answer to your rhetorical question, politicians now actively seek the endorsement of YIMBY groups. It can mean the difference between winning and losing an election against a NIMBY or borderline/questioning YIMBY candidate.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

I’m PP. You’re being deliberately obtuse, but since you can’t let things go (or understand nuance), I support the plans to switch the sidewalks and the planting strips for safety, and even widen them, though not to the extent that they eat up traffic lanes which is also proposed. I support making it easier for people to turn into retail establishments. I support improvements to existing bus stops to make them better for the people waiting. I support improvements to pedestrian crossings at busy intersections. I support duplexes and townhomes in certain areas, as well as infill of religious institutions subject to the details. I don’t support dedicated bus lanes, eliminating multiple traffic lanes, money spent on bike facilities in the middle of the suburbs, or mid-rise mixed use without a lot of thought going into traffic impacts.

Now I’m sure you’ll come back with “what does X even mean???” since you keep saying that. But you are purposefully choosing to not understand that people can support modest improvements without wanting everything overhauled, and I’m not going to keep going back and forth with you.

Not the guy youte replying to but I think we don't need a survey we can just tell you don't care about anything but preserving the driving status quo even if it makes things worse.

You realize all of the things I mentioned supporting are part of the existing May 14 presentation or the October 2023 staff study, right? Weird that you would be so bothered by that if you are a supporter of the initiative. Or is it just that YImBYs have to get their entire way on everything?

People drive in the suburbs and need to drive in the suburbs. You aren’t going to change that with a bus lane or bike lane or wider sidewalks, sorry.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

I’m PP. You’re being deliberately obtuse, but since you can’t let things go (or understand nuance), I support the plans to switch the sidewalks and the planting strips for safety, and even widen them, though not to the extent that they eat up traffic lanes which is also proposed. I support making it easier for people to turn into retail establishments. I support improvements to existing bus stops to make them better for the people waiting. I support improvements to pedestrian crossings at busy intersections. I support duplexes and townhomes in certain areas, as well as infill of religious institutions subject to the details. I don’t support dedicated bus lanes, eliminating multiple traffic lanes, money spent on bike facilities in the middle of the suburbs, or mid-rise mixed use without a lot of thought going into traffic impacts.

Now I’m sure you’ll come back with “what does X even mean???” since you keep saying that. But you are purposefully choosing to not understand that people can support modest improvements without wanting everything overhauled, and I’m not going to keep going back and forth with you.

Not the guy youte replying to but I think we don't need a survey we can just tell you don't care about anything but preserving the driving status quo even if it makes things worse.

This is a response to all that they wrote?

How on Earth do YIMBYs get their policies implemented…it seems like it would be easy pushing these awful arguments over.

In other news, it looks like the Forest Glen Civic Association played a part in stopping the construction of a large multifamily project near the metro station. Not sure what exactly was objectionable, but it is what it is. The 4corners associations need to get involved, and fast.

On the other hand, the large residential project in downtown Silver Spring on top of the mall is moving forward. I wonder what the difference was…? Could it be a properly zoned large scale project in a downtown area versus a medium high rise in a SFH residential zone?

While not exactly an answer to your rhetorical question, politicians now actively seek the endorsement of YIMBY groups. It can mean the difference between winning and losing an election against a NIMBY or borderline/questioning YIMBY candidate.

Because for most, it doesn't impact them, given the piecemeal approach taken by those interested in development of this type. Divide and conquer, "First they came for the Socialists...," call it what you want.

Those less- or non-impacted folks make up a majority of the county, vastly so when considering any individual development initiative, like the one here. They can espouse progressive values without bearing the brunt of ill-considered propositions related to those values (not that all such propositions might be ill considered).

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

I’m PP. You’re being deliberately obtuse, but since you can’t let things go (or understand nuance), I support the plans to switch the sidewalks and the planting strips for safety, and even widen them, though not to the extent that they eat up traffic lanes which is also proposed. I support making it easier for people to turn into retail establishments. I support improvements to existing bus stops to make them better for the people waiting. I support improvements to pedestrian crossings at busy intersections. I support duplexes and townhomes in certain areas, as well as infill of religious institutions subject to the details. I don’t support dedicated bus lanes, eliminating multiple traffic lanes, money spent on bike facilities in the middle of the suburbs, or mid-rise mixed use without a lot of thought going into traffic impacts.

Now I’m sure you’ll come back with “what does X even mean???” since you keep saying that. But you are purposefully choosing to not understand that people can support modest improvements without wanting everything overhauled, and I’m not going to keep going back and forth with you.

Not the guy youte replying to but I think we don't need a survey we can just tell you don't care about anything but preserving the driving status quo even if it makes things worse.

This is a response to all that they wrote?

How on Earth do YIMBYs get their policies implemented…it seems like it would be easy pushing these awful arguments over.

In other news, it looks like the Forest Glen Civic Association played a part in stopping the construction of a large multifamily project near the metro station. Not sure what exactly was objectionable, but it is what it is. The 4corners associations need to get involved, and fast.

On the other hand, the large residential project in downtown Silver Spring on top of the mall is moving forward. I wonder what the difference was…? Could it be a properly zoned large scale project in a downtown area versus a medium high rise in a SFH residential zone?

While not exactly an answer to your rhetorical question, politicians now actively seek the endorsement of YIMBY groups. It can mean the difference between winning and losing an election against a NIMBY or borderline/questioning YIMBY candidate.

Some of that I think is due to the YImBYs being so well organized, no matter how wrong. They can make their minority carry the weight of a majority through just showing up to meetings, etc. Of course, they hate public input when the rest of us know about the causes, but in far too many cases these proposals are just sold as, “Oh gosh gee ! Why would you be against sidewalks!” when the actual proposal is much deeper. That’s the purpose of threads like this, getting the reality out in public.

[Anonymous]

Just posted by the planning board:

Reminder: Help us envision the future of communities along University Blvd. at two upcoming community meetings. It's part of our Univ Blvd Corridor Master Plan.

Come in-person at 7pm on May 22: https://bit.ly/3V7mkug
Join us online at 7pm on May 28: https://bit.ly/4bI3ijG

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

I’m PP. You’re being deliberately obtuse, but since you can’t let things go (or understand nuance), I support the plans to switch the sidewalks and the planting strips for safety, and even widen them, though not to the extent that they eat up traffic lanes which is also proposed. I support making it easier for people to turn into retail establishments. I support improvements to existing bus stops to make them better for the people waiting. I support improvements to pedestrian crossings at busy intersections. I support duplexes and townhomes in certain areas, as well as infill of religious institutions subject to the details. I don’t support dedicated bus lanes, eliminating multiple traffic lanes, money spent on bike facilities in the middle of the suburbs, or mid-rise mixed use without a lot of thought going into traffic impacts.

Now I’m sure you’ll come back with “what does X even mean???” since you keep saying that. But you are purposefully choosing to not understand that people can support modest improvements without wanting everything overhauled, and I’m not going to keep going back and forth with you.

Not the guy youte replying to but I think we don't need a survey we can just tell you don't care about anything but preserving the driving status quo even if it makes things worse.

This is a response to all that they wrote?

How on Earth do YIMBYs get their policies implemented…it seems like it would be easy pushing these awful arguments over.

In other news, it looks like the Forest Glen Civic Association played a part in stopping the construction of a large multifamily project near the metro station. Not sure what exactly was objectionable, but it is what it is. The 4corners associations need to get involved, and fast.

On the other hand, the large residential project in downtown Silver Spring on top of the mall is moving forward. I wonder what the difference was…? Could it be a properly zoned large scale project in a downtown area versus a medium high rise in a SFH residential zone?

While not exactly an answer to your rhetorical question, politicians now actively seek the endorsement of YIMBY groups. It can mean the difference between winning and losing an election against a NIMBY or borderline/questioning YIMBY candidate.

Some of that I think is due to the YImBYs being so well organized, no matter how wrong. They can make their minority carry the weight of a majority through just showing up to meetings, etc. Of course, they hate public input when the rest of us know about the causes, but in far too many cases these proposals are just sold as, “Oh gosh gee ! Why would you be against sidewalks!” when the actual proposal is much deeper. That’s the purpose of threads like this, getting the reality out in public.

DP

and that comes with a level of politicization. The self-described YIMBYs, as seen on these threads, treat the entire thing as a winner take all political campaign. It's the exact opposite of good governance and sound policy making.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

Doing nothing is, in fact, the default option. It’s up to the council and the planning board to propose SPECIFIC changes AND provide some evidence that it’s worth the time and money spent, to include benefits to current residents of the area. Instead, the county treats this as a project that has already been decided and they are being SO gracious in allowing the residents to have some tangential input.

+100

There was no groundswell from the community to do anything. Why not start first in places where people are requesting support and services?

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Anonymous wrote:I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs.

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.

The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for.

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.

DP. You are deliberately being obtuse. The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?

That DP. Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse. A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a high percentage of such jobs. The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.

Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.

You seem to think that there's some tradeoff between, say, having density and transit vs. jobs. It's just so bizarre. People want to live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to be able to get to those jobs.

DP / that "that DP" from above. This "tradeoff"/"bizarre" characterization is yet another strawman-type argument. PP is saying that there should be focus on attracting high-paying jobs to the area so that commutes may more often occur within the county at presumably lower impact, similar to that end sought by planners, but with a more economically sustainable result than that likely resulting from that which those planners currently propose.

With regard to the second idea in your post, one could as easily say, "People live in this county, people with jobs. And they want to live with similar expectations related to the neighborhoods in which they settled as there were when they made the significant and heavily-burdensome-to-alter life decisions to settle there." I suggest that Montgomery Planning (and the County Council members who appoint/approve the planning board members) should be more responsible to the current residents of the county than to potential residents of the county where such conflict exists.

The County Council, which is elected by the voters of the county, keeps adopting plans that, according to DCUM, nobody wants - except evidently a majority of the voters of Montgomery County.

If you bought property in the expectation that nothing would change henceforth, I'm sorry, but you're going to be disappointed no matter what.

What kind of awful narcissist decides that they don’t like where people have chosen to live and thinks they they should have the power to change it to their liking?

What kind of awful narcissist thinks everything should be exactly the way it was when they personally arrived, and stay that way until they personally depart? Or possibly even after they personally depart.

Another straw man. No one is arguing this.

No? Then what is the argument?

There are 42 pages of comments talking about detailed concerns regarding traffic, parking, schools, financial cost-benefit, etc. Yet you think their argument is that “everything should be exactly the way it was” when those people arrived and “stay that way until they personally depart.”

So, again, straw man.

The detailed concerns are:

Change would cause car traffic, I'm against it.
Change would cause parking problems, I'm against it.
Change would overcrowd the schools, I'm against it.
Change will not benefit me but I will have to pay for it, I'm against it.
Change will make everything worse, even etc., I'm against it.

Nah. Just that change.

Oh yes. We definitely oppose the actual changes that are currently being proposed. But that doesn't mean we're against changes, in principle. In fact, we might even strongly support some completely hypothetical changes, somewhere else, that somebody might some day have an idea about!

Seriously, y'all. What are you FOR?

Generally speaking, traffic improvements to deal with congestion, solutions for parking where needed, good public schools, good public safety, targeted development of areas that are run down or have outlived their past usefulness (like some office space), pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes, local government fiscal policy that isn’t based on unrealistic constant breakneck growth, local politicians that aren’t captured by developers, recognition that cities have great elements to them but not every suburb has to be a 15 minute city, I could go on.

This plan is about land use, housing, and transportation. What changes in housing, land use, and transportation in the University Boulevard corridor are you for?

So that poster answers your question, including some items that address the housing/land use/transportation elements you later insist be addressed exclusively, but, instead of remarking about those items, you pick on the other items (which were part of an answer to your initial question). Just argumentative horse hockey.

What does "pedestrian improvements that actually help with safety and are not just performative while wrecking people’s commutes" mean, specifically? (Where people apparently mean drivers, because people also commute not in cars, and lots of car trips are not for work commutes.) Is this PP for sidewalks? Do sidewalks help safety? Are sidewalks bad for drivers? How about traffic signals? Crossing islands? Slower speed limits?

I don't think that "I'm for things that aren't these things I'm against" is really being for things, it's still being against things. The planners ask what changes you'd like to see in your neighborhood. What do you put on the list? If your list looks like this:

1. not this thing
2. also not that thing
3. in addition, not the other thing

you're just saying, "I don't want change."

Doing nothing is, in fact, the default option. It’s up to the council and the planning board to propose SPECIFIC changes AND provide some evidence that it’s worth the time and money spent, to include benefits to current residents of the area. Instead, the county treats this as a project that has already been decided and they are being SO gracious in allowing the residents to have some tangential input.

+100

There was no groundswell from the community to do anything. Why not start first in places where people are requesting support and services?

I think this is one of the most annoying things about all of these initiatives. I am dealing with it in Alexandria. They surveyed people in the King Street-Bradlee area to get their priorities, and the top 4 responses were 1) more trees, 2) wider sidewalks separated from vehicles, 3) stormwater treatment, and 4) larger bus shelters. While some of those features are there, the plan now prioritizes bike facilities and multimodal transit, with a heavy focus on bus only lanes to run the buses faster. The community engagement is just performative so the city planners can do whatever else they want.